Weâ€™ve created more than 800 content campaigns at Fractl over the years, and weâ€™d be lying if we told you every single one was a hit.

The Internet is a finicky place. You canâ€™t predict with 100% accuracy if your content will perform well. Sometimes what we think is going to do OK ends up being a massive hit. And there have been a few instances where weâ€™d expect a campaign to be a huge success but it went on to garner lackluster results.

While you canâ€™t control the whims of the Internet, you can avoid or include certain things in your content to help your chances of success. Through careful analysis weâ€™ve pinpointed which factors tend to create high-performing content. Similarly, weâ€™ve identified trends among our content that didnâ€™t quite hit the mark.

In this this post, Iâ€™ll share our most valuable lessons we learned from content flops. Bear in mind this advice applies if youâ€™re using content to earn links and press pickups, which is what the majority of the content we create at Fractl aims to do.

If youâ€™ve been at the content marketing game for a while, you probably agree with Rand. Seasoned content marketers know youâ€™re likely to see a percentage of content flops before you achieve a big win. Then, as you gain a sense for why some content fails and other content succeeds, you integrate what youâ€™ve learned into your process. Gradually, you start batting fewer base hits and more home runs.

At Fractl, we regularly look back at campaign performance and refine our production and promotion processes based on what the data tells us. Are publishers rejecting a certain content format? Is there a connection between Domain Authority (DA) and the industry vertical we targeted? Do certain topics attract the most social shares? These are the types of questions we ask, and then we use the related data to create better content.

We recently dug through three years of content marketing campaigns and asked: What factors increase contentâ€™s ability to earn links? In this … Read the rest

Unless your CEO is Steve Jobs or your product is Google Glass, very few journalists and bloggers are going to write about you directly, because they’re reluctant to give free press to for-profit businesses. Few people are going to share something on social media that will only help a corporation to make more money. To gain significant media coverage and launch creative campaigns that spread through the Internet, companies usually need to insert their brands into larger stories.

In this post, I will help readers to do exactly that by detailing nine of the traditional publicity strategies that PR executives have developed over the past century. The point to remember:

Successful creative publicity campaigns can lead to countless new customers, sales, leads, social followings, and backlinks.

We all know that creating and promoting content can be a ton of work (not to mention expensive). So how do we know whether it’ll be worth it? In today’s Whiteboard Friday, MozCon 2014 speaker Mike King shows you several ways you can be sure your content has the potential you need before you even start making it.

For reference, here’s a still of this week’s whiteboard!

Mike King. I’m from an agency called iPullRank, and today here on Whiteboard Friday we’re going to talk about how to prove ROI potential of content. Basically, before you launch content, get a sense of will this perform before you go ahead and spend tens of thousands of dollars on promoting that content.

Content components

Surveying your target audience

So let’s just hop right into it. One of the things you want to do for your content component aspect of it is survey your target audience. There are a lot of channels that you can do this effectively in. In fact, the ad platforms have gotten even better at letting you hyper target audiences

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz, Inc.

The SEO landscape has changed so much in the last few years in the wake of the Penguin and Panda apocalypse that the discipline is now considered in the broader terms of online marketing or digital marketing. The one element that is common is the requirement for new skills such as PR, classic marketing and most importantly: creativity. Agencies and freelance individuals who can’t adapt, evolve and embrace the new mode of thinking/operating are vulnerable with nowhere to hide behind mediocre work and outdated tactics.

Be more creative, is a phrase often used within business and marketing with little consideration given to its meaning. But, what does it mean to be creative?

There is much confusion about what creativity is and a general misconception of mistaking style for creativity. Most designers are stylists: they make things look good. Creativity is about concepts, ideas and innovation. In art school, I … Read the rest